It’s finally happened. I’m not funny. All my life I’ve been told I’m a ratbag. I’m a maniac. I need help. I see life different. Hint of lunacy in the blood. Touch of madness in the haircut. Dickins, he’s crazy. Dickins, he thinks like the turn-off to Shepparton.

Reading My Place by Sally Morgan reminds one of how powerful a book can be when there is an urgent story to be told. This book, let me say at the outset, is wonderful.

Sally Morgan and her four brothers and sisters grew up in Perth in the 1950s and 1960s. They are part Aboriginal, but didn’t know it then. They knew they were darker, different, perhaps they were Greek; their mother and grandmother told them they were Indian and this answer satisfied the kids at school, and them for a time.

As I write these words, I have just read the first forty-five pages of Murray Bail’s novel. Those pages are mostly about the Shadbolt family of Adelaide.

In her autobiographical sketch One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty wrote of her mother: ‘But I think she was relieved when I chose to be a writer of stories, for she thought writing was safe.’ Can you just imagine the shock on Chestina Welty’s face when she read, as she must have, this sentence tucked away into the middle of one of her daughter’s first stories: ‘When he finally looked down there was blood everywhere; her lap was like a bowl.’ 

In her interview with Candida Baker for Yacker 2, Jessica Anderson expresses her dissatisfaction with the covers of a number of her books, citing in particular the glum face on the paperback of The Impersonators and the representation of The Commandant as, in Baker’s words, ‘a Regency romance’. Anderson, who began as a commercial artist, stresses that ‘Design and presentation ... really matter. They’re the introduction to a book.’ It seems to me to be particularly unfortunate (although she may well have given it her blessing) that her new book sports a clichéd Ken Done cover. Perhaps Done’s bright colours might evoke the ‘warm zone’ of the title, although Anderson is referring to Brisbane, not Done’s mock-naïve view of Sydney. Unfortunately, the cover subliminally suggests that Anderson’s writing is sunnily comforting, easily assimilated.

There has been altogether too much talk recently about literature and bliss, and not enough about sadness. Think of the gloom that descends when you have read all the works of a beloved author, and no fresh fields and pastures new remain. Years ago, I suffered this depression after reading all the works of William Faulkner. There was a brief respite when Flags in the Dust, an ur-version of Sartoris, appeared, but brief it was.

Each person’s death diminishes us all, but the death last year of Olga Masters has removed from us, and our literature, a talent that had too little time to flourish.

It’s a favour to no-one to call him (certainly never her) ‘a modern Henry Lawson’ – as the back cover of Bruce Pascoe’s collection proclaims – because of the large and difficult questions that are raised. What does the name ‘Henry Lawson’ mean? ‘The Loaded Dog’, or ‘Water Them Geraniums’? The writer of humorous stories about the bush where life is animated by a huge and comic spirit, or of ones about living in the bush that leave you feeling dismayed and chilled to the bone? And who is this epithet aimed at? For some, Lawson is the face on the ten-dollar note; for others, he’s the successful Australian writer who went to England and failed to make any impression, returned, and then lived long enough to mourn his own decline as a writer, ending his life as a miserable drunk; for still others, he’s one of the first writers you read at school.